Flokk Design Sprint
Using the design sprint methodology, I facilitated a combined effort Design Sprint with Flokk in order to resolve a potential risk regarding SCIP reporting. In five days we were able to identify the problem, design a low fidelity prototype and test with a small group of users. Being my first time, I learned many lessons through the process. The first was that the combination of being highly organized and my ability to get people to be comfortable in vulnerable spaces thrives when it comes to workshop facilitation. The second (and more painful one) is that not all work created in a business will be implemented and result in a significant impact being made. Managing those expectations are going to be something you are responsible for, even if you have no control over the budget!
Summary
I served as the lead facilitator for this design sprint, addressing a growing challenge in Flokk’s sustainability department: managing supplier information to comply with increasing regulations. As the company scaled, tracking whether components contained substances of high concern—or if this data was missing—became complex. We aimed to design a cross-functional tool to mark components, enable suppliers to input and own their data, and simplify reporting. Potential features included change requests and workflow triggers.
Given the broad scope, we focused on prototyping one key feature. Using the Design Sprint Methodology (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test), our nine-person team from Dolittle and Flokk developed and tested a prototype within five days.
High level goals
Two years from now, any change in master data is immediately updated everywhere in Flokk
Two years from now, Flokk is a leader and sets cross-industry standards in data cooperation with suppliers
Sprint Questions
These were the biggest concerns that we knew we needed to address:
Can we compel the suppliers to use our solution?
Can we properly join forces and funds with the supplier portal team?
The feature
Based on the interviews, research, and the goals that we had, we decided we needed to tackle HOW the suppliers could share the needed information in a way that minimised manual work for the Flokk team and avoided emails. We also wanted to move away from a ‘single man solution’ or information living in the mind or personal files of one person.
Guiding principles in Design
This needs to be easy for suppliers to grasp and take action
It should provide value to the supplier as well as to Flokk - reduce manual effort and provide control where possible
This must be integrated into existing Flokk solutions - Supplier Portal (a customised application that is used to manage stock and forecasting)
This must be designed for Flokk’s internal team of developers to be able to update or improve upon it – must be built using MUI React
The focus
The prototype's goal is to allow a supplier to:
Be notified that there has been a change to the SCIP (Substances of Concern in Products) Candidate List
Review the change and
Notify Flokk of any articles that use substances of very high concern or confirm that they do not use them
The Design Process
A design sprint thrives on collaboration, leveraging diverse perspectives to create solutions that address multiple needs. However, involving "non-designers" in the process requires clear structure and strong facilitation to ensure everyone contributes effectively.
We began by splitting into smaller groups and brainstorming rough sketches of ideas. Although a user flow wasn’t required, the participants’ analytical nature led to one emerging organically.
Below are examples of the sketches shared, along with key comments and observations from the group discussions.
Bearing these concepts in mind, each person came up with a 6 step user flow that had a realistic entry point, and ended at an ideal place.
The last activity we had the group perform was storyboarding. It was clear that enthusiasm was waning, and people were lacking confidence in using design muscles for the first time, so we had to provide support and encouragement at this point.
Wireframes
At this point, I took over and worked independently on the wireframes. I did reach out to subject matter experts as needed, but from a business perspective, it was more valuable to release individuals back to their day to day activities rather than being in a workshop.
We started with low fidelity sketches and below are some examples of these, the yellow sticky notes indicate feedback comments:
Users would receive a notification in the supplier portal that a new substance of high concern had been added to the Candidate list and needs reviewing.
I then created a mid fidelity prototype for testing purposes in figma and below are some of the screens created:
Users could then choose if they wanted to immediately begin the review or postpone the deadline. They could also indicate immediately if the substance was not one that was in any of their products.
This is what the postpone deadline flow may look like:
If the supplier was ready to begin the declaration, they start by selecting which SVHC are in their products:
They will then be taken through a flow per SVHC where they can add the products that contain that specific substance:
Once all the products have been added, the user then will see a summary of all the new additions:
The user then can select which products they will add a SCIP declaration to:
Once the declaration has been signed, the dashboard could look something like this:
After some feedback from the Flokk team, we changed a few things. The first change was to add an email notification as an entry point. This means that if the user is very active in the supplier portal, they would see the notification and begin the declaration as part of their day to day, but for those users that are less active, we could add an email notification which is a more neutral entry point and less reliant on supplier portal ‘buy in’.
We also added some helper text, error comments or alerts to assist the user experience and avoid errors being carried forward:
We would also ensure that only dates which were future and met the 30 day criteria would be available for selection in the date picker. If a user chose to rather use a date input field, these criteria would also need to be built in.
These changes all resulted in a limited prototype being built for user testing. Due to the time constraints, it was very limited and modelled a largely ‘ideal’ user flow. This did lead to some difficulties at the user testing point. If you want to explore the prototype, you can do so here.
User Testing
We engaged Flokk's Supplier team to recruit testers from a mix of small and large suppliers. However, interest was minimal due to poor timing and limited follow-up, despite providing invitation templates. Ultimately, we tested the prototype with representatives from Carpenter, a supplier to Flokk.
While the prototype was user-friendly, Carpenter raised a critical issue: suppliers often juggle multiple systems for different clients, making adoption challenging. This feedback highlighted the need to offer clear benefits or incentives—such as time or cost savings—or even prioritize their products despite higher costs if the system reduces internal expenses for Flokk.
On a functional level, the primary challenge was selecting the correct SCIP number, a complex 36-character hexadecimal code with no relational logic across parts. To address this, the prototype must support copy-paste functionality and implement smart search features instead of relying solely on dropdown lists.
Next Steps
This design sprint was undertaken in part due to there being available billed hours which needed to be used. While the sustainability department very much felt the need to improve their process around Substances of High Concerns and were expecting the reporting processes to become more rigorous and greater consequences for non compliance, it was not yet a priority for the digital transformation. For this reason, no further design or development has been scheduled.
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